1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method, a system, and a program product for checking at least one of a control model and a control program installable in an electronic control unit. The control program is generated based on the control model.
2. Description of the Related Art
Development of control programs for controlling a target, such as an engine installed in a vehicle, includes the following steps of:
writing a control program based on a control model in which requested specifications for controlling a target are designed to be described;
checking whether the coded control program contains bugs to debug the bugs when the bugs are contained in the control program based on the checked result;
installing the debugged control program in an electric control unit installed in an actual vehicle to check the fitness of the installed control program; and
debugging the control program based on the result of the fitness check.
In recent years, model-based development of control programs has been carried out. The model-based development includes automatically generating a control program written in a program language from a control model in which requested specifications are described.
In the model-based development, simulation of the control model on the computer allows the validity of the control model's operations to be verified. Construction of the control model is more simplified than generation of the control program so that adaptation of the model-based development to control program development will make the control program development more efficient.
Let us consider cases of automatically coding the control program or hand-coding it.
When debugging the control model and the control program generated by the automatic coding or the hand coding, it is important to verify not only the operations of the control model and the control program on a personal computer simulation, but also the operations of them on an electronic control unit in which the control program is installed. This requires debug of the automatically coded or hand-coded control program installed in the electronic control unit. The control program is commonly installed in the electronic control unit as part of an operating system (OS), such as a real-time operating system (RTOS). When finding bugs in any one of the control model and the control program during the debugging, the construction of the control program may make it difficult to identify locations of bugs in the other of the control model and the control program that correspond to the locations of the bugs in the one of the control model and the control program.